ian, on Abe Greenwald:

Terms like “Israel Lobby” are designed to stigmatize disagreement in McCarthyite fashion. “Mere words” having meaning and significance. By injecting a term like Lobby into debate, it is a direct effort to repress debate, to smear and intimidate those who disagree with the propounders of the anti-Israel view as disloyal and conspiratorial for the mere act of disagreeing. The Orwellian aspect of this pattern is that those who employ this term or terms like “neo-con” or “Likudnik” always try to represent themselves as heroically standing up for freedom of expression against alleged powerful interests. However the opposite is clearly true, and the ultimate target of this rhetorical gambit is freedom of expression itself. Time after time the critics of the “Lobby” argument point to how vaguely and amorphously the term is employed. Yet what is in one sense a logical defect is also a deliberate intention; by casting the net of stigmatization wide enough to encompass anyone in public life that does not share the anti-Israel view, this allows the motives of anyone making a seeming pro-Israel expression to be maligned. It is ultimately a sad effort to delegitimize dissent. Strange then how so many supposed defenders of free expression in the media and on the internet find the idea of stigmatizing oppositon so seductive so as to either endorse it outright or to maintain a studied ignorance while glibly referring to criticism by mere “supporters of Israel”.